WASHINGTON — Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s top aide Ricky Buria told colleagues last year that he and his boss donned disguises and went out drinking together — a juicy bit of gossip that’s widely believed to be a lie and recklessly planted to sniff out leakers, The Post has learned.
Two sources said that Buria, 44, told them separately in early 2025 that he and Hegseth, 45, slipped past the secretary’s security detail while he was staying at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Pentagon City.
There’s no proof that the great escape actually happened, but the tale has reverberated within the administration and stoked continued frustration with Buria’s powerful role leading US military policy.
Many people close to or inside the Trump administration say they believe Buria, a Biden administration holdover who formed a fast friendship with Hegseth, was ham-handedly attempting to catch leakers — but put the secretary at risk of scandal in the meantime.
Both sources who heard the story directly from Buria question the Pentagon chief of staff’s judgment and motives for spreading such a potentially destructive story, which they said was told often enough that busting a media source would be difficult.
Hegseth had publicly vowed ahead of his January Senate confirmation not to drink “a drop of alcohol” to guarantee the nation would have “fully dialed-in Pete” in times of crisis, following reports alleging drunken misbehavior in the recent past.
The Post’s first source said he was shocked when Buria told him the tale inside a Pentagon office in late March or April.
“My first impression of it was he was trying to figure out if I was going to tell other people. But then I come to find out a couple months later that he was running around telling people,” the source said.
“It was a weird way of him bragging. It was clearly part of this whole bizarre effort to make it seem like he was Pete’s best friend and confidant.”
“I was talking to [a different Pentagon official] and I said, ‘This is f–king crazy. Ricky is telling people he put on disguises and went out drinking with the secretary,’” the first source recalled.
“[The other official] said, ‘Yeah he was telling a lot of people this.’”
The source did not recall Buria, who rose swiftly from his initial role as a junior military aide to Hegseth’s right-hand man, specifying the disguise worn or the bar the men purportedly visited. The other official with whom the source recalled conversing would not make himself available for an interview.
“This did not happen. But nonetheless, he told people it happened,” the first source said.
“It didn’t happen because the secretary has a security detail. He told this story as a way to try and make it seem like he was really close to Hegseth and possibly had leverage over him.”
Several additional sources familiar with Buria, including one aware of the tale, suspect that he was attempting to trap leakers after persistently stirring drama within the department — though, notably, no outlet has been naive enough to publish the wild claims.
The second Trump administration, in particular the White House, has been more disciplined about discouraging leaks and punishing those responsible, though allegations of gabbing without authorization are often incredibly difficult to prove due to the widespread use of encrypted apps.
Buria’s rise coincided with his deepening friendship with both Hegseth and his wife, Jennifer, as many of the defense secretary’s longtime associates were forced out of their roles for alleged leaks, for which many were later exonerated.
“Ricky occupies one of the most important positions in the Department of War. He is responsible not just for helping run the secretary’s front office but for driving coordination of critical activities across the department and the rest of the administration,” the first source said.
“Behavior like this only creates distractions for the department as it tries to execute multiple no-fail military operations. From day one, both as a military aide and then as a chief of staff, Ricky has consistently heightened the level of drama, paranoia and infighting in the secretary’s office.”
While the first source believes Buria lied in a manipulative ploy to inflate his standing, a second source said he initially took the drinking story at face value.
The topic emerged during an April flight when Buria revealed nearly three bottles of Macallan whisky had been consumed on the trip, without saying by whom.
“Ricky then proceeds to say, ‘I protect him, don’t worry’,” insinuating Hegseth partook, before launching into his account of the purported Ritz-Carlton caper.
“He made a mention that when [Hegseth] was staying at the Ritz before [his DC] house was ready but then also once in Tennessee that ‘a hat and sunglasses,’ or something to that effect, basically is all you need to be able to sneak out and that it was kind of amazing that nobody recognized them,” the source said.
“[Buria] said, ‘Yeah, hey look, I’m just there to make sure he’s protected and he doesn’t get in any sort of trouble and people don’t recognize him. But yeah, we have to sneak out.’”
The second source said that he and another official who heard the story aboard the plane were outraged and lashed out at Buria, questioning why he would claim to abet a violation of Hegseth’s no-alcohol pledge.
“Ricky’s immediate response there was he was just f–king around. It was only because the temperature was turning up,” this source said.
The other man said to be party to that conversation denied remembering the episode through an intermediary contacted by The Post and did not directly respond to requests for an interview.
Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson told The Post: “This is false, and the Department is not going to entertain Washington gossip while we are focused on major military operations abroad.”
Buria is a rare Biden administration holdover who openly dreamed of a political future as a Democrat in Florida before making a rare and rapid leap from his uniformed role to acting as Hegseth’s de facto chief of staff last year.
Fellow Pentagon aides heard Buria disparage President Trump’s use of the military along the southern border and said he called Vice President JD Vance a “crazy” isolationist, The Post reported last year.
The New York Times reported last week that Buria last summer had a “heated exchange” with Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, a friend and former law school classmate of Vance’s, over Driscoll’s selection of Maj. Gen. Antoinette R. Gant for a promotion to command of the Military District of Washington.
Buria told Driscoll that Trump would not want to stand next to a black woman at events, the Times reported, drawing an outraged response from the Army chief, who told Buria “the president is not a racist or sexist.” Driscoll elevated the dispute to the White House, and Gant got the promotion.
The White House last year blocked Buria from officially becoming Hegseth’s chief of staff due to concerns about his ideological alignment with the administration. Trump ultimately relented to Hegseth, who insisted Buria was essential, and allowed his formal elevation as chief of staff in December.
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